Siefried Zielinksi:Lecture 4
Genealogy of Electricity: Several strands
What is the quality of advanced media technology?
A metaphysics of tele-Communication--what is the derivation?
The process oriented character of the praxises called "Media Art".
1. Time based Media: time based praxis form of art.
-Not accessible because we are floating inside of time. If we want to step out of time and look at it as an object. Process/time structure. We can not step out of time unless we are dead.
-Time is the only thing we do not have. Time has us. Unless you have money then you can buy it. We are part of time as a process while it consumes us.
-We can objectivize time, construct it, listen to it via music, make time and watch it through film and video, taste time (cheese, wine), steer and control time.
-Ancient Greeks already knew about the complexity of this issue--> kronos, chronology, duration. Kronos as a time form which we suffer. We cannnot be passionate with chronology but suffer from it. Hence, KAIROS was created: time form for the the suspicious moment, as something grasped, as possibility. It has no extension like zero in mathematics. Can only be grasped from the front. Kairos has long hair in the front, bald in the back as metaphorical to confronting time.
-Aeon refers to this time which is beyond us and imagination. The most sacred. God's time. Machinic time. Dasein--> the open universe.
Kronos-->destruction
Kairos-->imaginary. Zero dimension. Art which is generated through media is a kairos poetry and/or chaos pilotism.
Art------> before the Media
Art------> with Media
Art------> through Media
Art------> after Media
"Art through Media happens if/when power is floating." -Zielinski
"Before living bodies became time images through electrical media they had been media- consductors in the direct sense of the word."-Eliasson
Electricity is the soul of New Media." -Zielinski
-Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) 3rd experiment with flesh of sheep and frogs to prove that living flesh contained electricity. (Including light boys and girls.)
-Stephen Gray 1740's experiments on electrifying young boys.--> Literally, "The Age of Enlightenment" at its utmost extreme in which light-weight beings were victim to these experiments which then led (over 100 years later) Edison's invention of the electric chair.
-Georg Matthias Bose (1740s) "The Venus Kiss" installed at salons and parties. A woman plugged to the device and a man would go in the room to kiss her and get shocked.
-Fritz Kan "Das Leben Des Menschen" (Man As An Industrial Palace) 5 volumes.
Braune/Fischer 1895--->Bodies becoming images of time by analyzing their movement. Technical elements.--> excorporation: the body turned into mechanical object.
(The female body was exploited as a field for electrical experiments in which she then became a representation of it.)
-Etienne-Jules Marey. "EJM 2" He was interested in physical movement of a living body. "Live time" becomes an object for exploitation.
-"The Long Now Project", Stuart Brand, Danny Hillis, Brian Eno and others (1999)
Aionic time: 10,000 years of precise time measuring. (only for humans that's a long time.)
Cybernetics as a form of power praxis in thinking of "the new man".
"Bioscope"--to see time as a form of light
-Horkheimer's "Notes Before the Shadow of Germany".
In late 18th century, Theology got involved with Electricity and claimed that electricity was God's presence in the world. These were protestant theologians. Claimed that electricity is God in material form.
-Athanasius Kircher's "Magnes sive Arte Magnetica" in 3 volumes, (1641).
Thus arrives the dialectics of Friendship & Warship.
In the 18th century, Notions of Power were much stronger than notions of friendships.
Thus, the physicist/electrician Volta Giossepe.
"Machina Electrica" for writing into distance with electric sparkles. Parthenius/Mazzolari Electricorum, 1767. Sparkles were what code in computer programming is today.
-Jean Baptiste de la Borde "Clavequin Electronique", circa 1760's. Electricity used to make music. The origins of electronic music was from de la Borde.
Archaic Chinese clockwork: powder burning in a labyrinth is showing time consumption which also created the fluid appearance and disappearance of an image.
-J. Antoine Nollet (1700-1770) Develops The image of electricity. Uses electricity to create image which served as a prelude to cinema with regard to literally WATCHING time through the development of FIREWORKS. This derives from Chinese fire explosives. Used to celebrate God and frighten people (Jesuits.) Images in time for the first time. [But what about the shadow from Plato's Cave? Was this not an image based on time already through fire and shadow?]
-Georg Christoph Lechtenberg (1742)
-Ernst Florens Friedrich "Theory of Sounds" (1787)
-Phono-Autograph, Leone Scott, 1857. First experiment with Text translated into Sound.
Media Art stems from functionalities, possibilities, experimentation from 18th century.
-Johannes Ritter (1800's) Damaged his body to prove electricity. Dealt with epistemologies of sound & image. Died at age 33. Opium addict and alcoholic. Wrote 6,000 of noted works. Used his own body as a laboratory. Investigated sound as frequency. For him light and sound was a question of frequency. He thought of the entire universe as a gigantic instrument which produced sound. The Sun produced the purest sound; a true form of giving. The Sun is the source of all visual experience. [Let Media begin with the Sun at least!!!] Walter Benjamin loved him.
-George Bataille's "The Economy of the Universe"
-Karl-Heinz Stockhausen--a musical descendant of Ritter. Explored possibilities of tape-recording, investigated musical structures of many levels. His last esoteric piece "Cycle of Life" runs for 24 hours.
Finally, the Separation of the Message from the body of the Messenger--> the Electric guitar and amplifiers.
Now we are stuck tryen to Rent Time--- oh hell no.
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